


The Right Hand Knows Not

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Action/Adventure, Conspiracy, Drama, Fondue, Friendship, Gen, Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One compliant, Not Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Compliant, Spies & Secret Agents, relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-11 01:19:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"S.H.I.E.L.D isn’t about heroes saving ordinary people, Gibson – or it shouldn’t be. It’s about protecting Earth from anything and anyone who would attack it – and sometimes from ourselves."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this was to be the sequel to '[Give A Girl A Moment And She'll Take You For All She's Got](http://archiveofourown.org/works/455288)' in which All Is Revealed.
> 
> It got out of hand. Like, _seriously_ out of hand.
> 
> There are conspiracies and spies and multiple missions and a lot of threads, old history, new allies, and an awful lot of words. And it's not (yet) finished. It's a work in progress - currently sitting at 25K - and I'm hoping that by posting it, enough people will show an interest to give me the requisite kick in the butt to get back to writing this.
> 
> Also, I want as much it out there as possible before Cap 2 screens. It's already been thoroughly Jossed by Iron Man 3, Agents of SHIELD, and probably Thor 2 to boot, so...yeah. This is basically "Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One" compliant and nothing else.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy,  
or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage  
can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter...  
Once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy,  
but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events...

~ Winston Churchill ~

 

 

**Part One: Pupae**

_It was cold beneath the night-spangled sky, cold enough for her exhaled breath to steam before her eyes._

_Solid ground beneath her feet, flat and stable. Icy rock, uneven and biting when she put out a hand to stabilise herself, dizzy and breathless and stunned as she looked up._

_Galaxies spun slowly overhead across a velvet dome, a great spatter of stars smeared across a canvas of midnight blue. And yet there was emptiness out there – a great black vacuum of space and energy and time that tugged at her senses._

_Something whispered past her, the echoes of sibillant voices snaking through the twists and turns of the rocky maze she was in – high walls, flat path, and the shadows cast by the billions of ovehead stars...and something more._

_She felt it here – the sense of ‘other’ that crawled down her spine and made the hairs at her nape prickle. As though there was someone else – something else watching her, aware and interested._

_Turning slowly, listening for the sound of anything beyond her own heartbeat, her own rasping breath, she heard nothing but silence, saw nothing but the shadows and the rock..._

_She exhaled as her heart pounded then froze when the echoes of her sigh whispered back. “Who’s there?”_

_Her voice skittered away along the craggy, cracked surfaces of the rock walls. Then the echoes murmured back at her with the voices of the dead and dying. Shadows grew deeper, dragging themselves out of the icy rock as she reaching for a weapon she didn’t carry in her dreams._

_She backed away, but cold slid around her, across her, through her, crawling through her flesh and her bones, turning her to ice…_

* * *

 

Maria jerked up in the bed, clawing off the sheets that clung to her sweat-laced skin, to sit, panting in the darkness.

Uncertainty clawed at her gut in the soft darkness before her eyes adjusted to the faint fringe of light coming from the phone screen lit up beside her hand, and her mind recalled her to where she was.

A safehouse run by S.H.I.E.L.D in Gdansk, Poland.

She glanced at the display on the phone: _Romanoff – Eastern Europe_. Maria sat up, dragging the patchwork covering with her and hummed a little to get the sleep out of her voice before she answered the call.

“This is Hill.”

“They’re loading the shipment,” said the Black Widow on the other end of the line. “They should be on the move by midnight.”

Maria ran the plan through her head again. “Then we’ll time it from when they leave the depot. Narrow window, full caliber.”

“Copy that. Heigel’s already on his way out and Clint is going over the chopper with Steve.”

“You’re intent on bringing Rogers into this?”

“We’re down two men, and he needs to see more of the modern world than the US if he’s going to work with us. Europe’s a start, and he’s been here before. ”

“Seventy years ago.” Still, Maria wasn’t about to dismiss Natasha’s estimation out of hand. “Your assessment of his skillset?”

“The training he’s had so far has been pretty thorough on basic techniques, weaponry, modern warfare. The Rangers took him through long term, modern-day survival. Clint’s taking him through street-smart 101 now, but he won’t need that tonight. He’s up on the basics of our procedures, and if you’re pulling both Clint and myself on this, then we’ll be there to keep an eye on him.” A pause. “He needs to learn to work with S.H.I.E.L.D, Maria.”

The part that was sticking in Maria’s throat was taking an untried operative on this mission – and, for all his experience in WWII, Rogers was an untried S.H.I.E.L.D. operative in the modern world, even if the Black Widow was recommending him.

“You’re sure he’s up to it?”

“We’ll never know if we don’t try him.”

She was tempted to ask exactly _what_ Natasha Romanoff had tried with Steve Rogers. One of those questions Maria knew better than to ask. Then again it might simply be the Black Widow’s appreciation of a man who respected her skillset and valued her as an operative without regard to the fact that she was a beautiful woman.

“He’s with you,” she said, and it was blessing and warning both. “Abrahams, Gibson, and I will be on the road within the hour, we’ll be pacing you. I’ll send further updates by text.”

They rang off briskly, neither of them prone to the awkward niceties of ending phone conversations.

Maria sat for a moment in the darkness of the room, then tossed the phone into the sheets beside her, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

The dreams were getting worse.

_Icy shadows snaking through her soul--_

No.

Maria shivered, then threw back the covers and climbed out of bed, heading for the bathroom. She needed a hot shower - something to wake her up, to push away the cold that always invaded her after one of these dreams.

Under the hot spray, she could almost dismiss the dream – the latest one in a long series stretching back two months.

Almost.

_Cold rock, cold stars, emptiness that pulled at something inside her – and a lurking, lingering dread..._

Even the heat of the shower couldn’t fully dispel the coldness inside her.

* * *

“You _did_ know that lying in a bed alone with your eyes shut usually involves sleep, right?”

Maria shot a glare at the driver of the S.H.I.E.L.D. communications van as they took the entrance onto the motorway. The traffic flow was easy – more or less expected this close to midnight. They’d be at the contact point well in time for the mission. “I’m surprised you didn’t just say I looked like hell, Miri.”

“I would have said you look like hell warmed over. Only I think hell warmed over would look better than you.”

There were few in the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D. who would have said such a thing to Maria, but Miri Abrahams had known Maria for the entirety of their careers, since the day they’d both walked into HQ in New York for the first-day induction class of 2002. In the back of the van, young Agent Gibson was staring at them, wide-eyed.

“Thanks,” Maria said dryly as the Israeli-pop that Miri preferred for driving launched into a ridiculously up-beat chorus.

“You know, I realise you’re on clean-up duty after you gave the Council the finger, but surely Thorpe or one of his seniors could have handled this?”

“Alan was the one who asked Fury to send me in.”

“Are things that busy in the office?” Miri frowned. “So far as I know, most of the hunting for Loki’s mercenary force is being handled from Delhi.”

Maria pondered how much to say with Gibson listening in the back, and figured it was time the young man got a few lessons in internal politics at S.H.I.E.L.D. “I suspect it had more to do with the people-managing side of this mission.”

“Ah.” Miri shot her a curious look. “I’m surprised you’re not of his party.”

“ _I heard Fury assigned you as liaison for the Avengers.” Alan said, swivelling idly from side to side in his chair. Maria met the gaze of the head of S.H.I.E.L.D’s European Operations without blinking._

“ _Someone had to, and Phil’s no longer available.”_

_After two months, she no longer got the lump in her throat when she spoke of Phil, but something in her chest ached._

“ _Become a supergroupie?”_

_Her eyes narrowed. “You know me better than that, Alan.”_

“ _I do.” He admitted it with a little tilt of the head. “But people change. You might have turned dark-side after New York – there are enough people waving the superhero banner these days.”_

“ _Even over here?”_

“ _Even over here.”_

“Who says I’m not of Alan’s party?”

“Well,” Miri navigated around a couple of cars which were chugging along. “You went in to bat for Fury against the Council. You’ve been handed management of the Avengers Initiative when there’s nearly a queue for the job. And you’re here, in Europe, when you’re technically in charge of helicarrier operations and the helicarrier is presently hovering off the east coast of Africa.”

When all put together, it could look that way.

When all put together, it was wrong.

“I’m seconded to clean-up for the duration. Which includes this shipment. The fact that Romanoff, Barton, and Rogers are part of it is incidental.”

“If you say so.” But Miri didn’t sound convinced as they turned south, heading towards Torun.

“I do,” Maria said, pulling out her phone and sending off the text code for ‘on the road’. It would be received by all units, to indicate that they were still green for the op. She unbuckled her belt and climbed into the back of the truck, indicating to Agent Gibson that he should start up the equipment monitors.

It was at least ten miles to the first contact point, after which they had some sixty miles in which to pick the perfect point to hijack the targeted truck, get it to a depot where they could offload its cargo, and get the purloined cargo away.

And all of it to happen before the sun came up.

Piece of cake.

“Comms encryption is up,” said Gibson, typing in the codes to start the encryption algorithms. He was young, but efficient – solid field agent material. “I’m running a pingback check on all comms units. Should I get them to call in?”

“Stick with the pingback unless there are issues. Otherwise we’ll leave the comms check until T-minus-fifteen.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Maria pulled up the notes on the shipment – one chilled unit full of Chitauri corpses, the information passed on from a reliable contact in Newfoundland. She was pretty sure she could recite them from memory by now, but there was always the possibility that something new would jump out at her.

In the aftermath of the battle of New York, the relief at the Chitauri defeat had rapidly given way to despair at the magnitude of the clean-up job. As had happened after 9/11, crews had worked in shifts, day and night, to clear the streets of the Chitauri corpses and the debris caused during the attack and subsequent battle.

And people, being people, had started collecting trophies.

Within a day after the battle, an intact Chitauri head was selling for $2,000 US on eBay, and a complete body was selling for $10,000 easy.

S.H.I.E.L.D put a halt to that fast. Trophying was one thing, but the alien corpses themselves were another. Bone matter, brain matter, ichor, and DNA… That wasn’t even counting the matter of the carapaces or the flying technology they held – ‘skimmers’ someone had called them and the name had held. Technology and biotechnology beyond what Earth knew. Biotechnology that certain people – certain groups – would pay a great deal to have.

Biotechnology that S.H.I.E.L.D didn’t particularly want them to have.

“Pingback check successful, Lieutenant,” Gibson said.“All comm units responding.”

Maria nodded. “Good. Barton will drop us a text once they’re lifting off, and then we’ll do the full status check-in. Now ping the GPS units.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Gibson hesitated with the catch of breath that meant he had a question to ask and was thinking whether to ask it. Maria counted silently to five before he spoke again. “You don’t like the Avengers, do you, Lieutenant?”

Up the front, Miri made a noise like a snort. And this was the kind of territory that had tended to get Maria into trouble lately. Although, by now, she was rather used to both the question and the trouble.

“That would be correct, Agent Gibson.”

The young man seemed to be considering how to phrase his next question. Maria pre-empted him. “You want to know how I can _not_ like the people who saved the world from the Chitauri?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Gibson, you’ve heard the saying that we can’t all be heroes because someone has to clap as they go by?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Has it occurred to you that S.H.I.E.L.D shouldn’t be among the people clapping as they go by?”

“I—” He hesitated. “But Director Fury pushed for formation of the Avengers Initiative.”

“Yes, he did. He wanted a first-response team. Which he got.” Maria sighed a little. “I’m grateful the Avengers saved Earth from the Chitauri. But when people tell me that the Avengers are heroes and should be treated as such, I get angry. Because S.H.I.E.L.D isn’t about heroes saving ordinary people, Gibson – or it shouldn’t be. It’s about protecting Earth from anything and anyone who would attack it – and sometimes from ourselves. Captain Rogers, the Black Widow, and Hawkeye are tools suitable to get the job done. If we forget that as agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, if we treat them like heroes – like they’re too good to be breathing the same air as us, we’re not doing our job and we’re not letting them do theirs.”

He was thinking about that rather than answering immediately – a young man with a brain and a willingness to use it. Younger than Maria ever remembered being but not stupid – just naïve, and with a mild case of supergroupie.

That wasn’t uncommon after the New York attack, even in S.H.I.E.L.D.

Hell, it hadn’t been uncommon in S.H.I.E.L.D _before_ the New York attack.

Tony Stark might be a pain to deal with, but he’d had his fans; and if anyone hadn’t known about Coulson’s crush before S.H.I.E.L.D dug Rogers out of the ice, they certainly did after.

But Coulson hadn’t gone supergroupie on the Avengers. He’d dealt with Rogers professionally. He’d done the job.

He’d got himself killed.

Maria still wasn’t ready to forgive him for that.

“We’re S.H.I.E.L.D. We protect the earth by whatever means necessary,” she said to Gibson. “If that means using superheroes one day and wading hip-deep through rotting Chitauri corpses the next, well, that’s the job we were hired to do. And who better to do it right than us?”

“Someone else?” Gibson grinned, then stifled the smile. “Sorry, ma’am.”

Maria’s mouth twitched. A sense of humour, then. Not a bad thing in an agent. “If I could find an organisation I’d trust not to turn those Chitauri into the next biogenetic experiment, I’d be happy to let them do the clean-up.”

“This wasn’t in the hiring brochure.” Gibson managed to sound both amused and resigned, but turned as his terminal pinged and he turned to check on it.

Maria glanced forward and saw Miri watching her in the rearview mirror. She arched her brows and noted Miri’s shrug of the shoulders. Whether or not she agreed, Miri at least understood Maria’s point of view – that superheroes weren’t always the answer.

For a little while, Maria had hoped that Phase 2 would be the answer – weapons of power that could be used to drive back an invading army. The danger of weapons was always that someone had to wield them – and you had to trust that the person wielding them wasn’t going to turn them on you. Power corrupted, as the Tesseract showed.

Maria didn’t know what the answer was anymore. She didn’t know if she even _wanted_ an answer for what was rapidly becoming a far more complicated question than she’d ever envisaged.

A glance at her watch showed that it was nearly half-past two. Must be just about time.

“Coming up on the engagement zone,” Miri reported from the front.

“GPS squawkers?”

“One truck, four escorts.” Gibson paused. “Wasn’t it three escorts in the briefing?”

“They upped security.” Maria frowned. “Text all units and request response.” If they’d increased the escort, then there might be other measures to improve security – measures that they couldn’t see and couldn’t prepare for.

Then again, being ready for the unexpected was part of every S.H.I.E.L.D. agent’s job – to deal with the situations they couldn’t see coming; to take action when the unexpected happened. From taking control of a city, ruthlessly cleaning it out from rooftops to cellars, to diving for cover when an agent was suborned to become an enemy.

Still, forewarning never went astray.

A little window came up on her terminal screen, rerouted from her cell. She glanced at it. “Hawkeye’s in the air. Tell them the mission is on, inform them of the increased security measures.” She didn’t need to tell Romanoff to keep an eye out for unexpected countermeasures – there was a reason the Black Widow was legendary in the Intelligence Operative community.

Gibson reported out and the responses started coming back. Romanoff, presently riding shotgun with Hawkeye, confirming Rogers and Dr. Seuss with her for the truck takeover. Unit Nine backing them up, and Unit Four in the depot in Stogi, ready for the transfer of cargo from the chilled transport unit to the lift cradle, ready to be flown out to a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility standing ready to receive it.

Maria waited for the call-in from the sniper position, her unease growing with each minute that passed.

“It’s not like Matt to keep us waiting,” Miri said from the front.

“No.” Matthew Heigel was another operative who’d been there from Maria’s first day at S.H.I.E.L.D. Unlike either Miri or Maria, he’d specialised in one area – sniping – and was considered one of the best in his area. He didn’t have the range and skill that Barton had, nor the ability to think his way out of a complicated situation, but when it came to aim and execution of the mission parameters, he was one of the best.

He usually took a while to get his message in – he preferred being set up before he gave the all-clear signal – but this was pushing it.

“T minus ten minutes,” Gibson reported, and there was doubt in his eyes. “Lieutenant, we’ve got a narrow window for convoy visibility...”

Maria didn’t snap that she knew the timing. She’d rehearsed it in her head over and over, ever since she’d worked this plan out – a quick takeover, before diverting truck and cargo to a pickup point where they’d leave the truck and take the cargo.

On her terminal, Maria typed out a message to Heigel, adding a code for urgency. The sniper was the key – to keeping everything from spiralling out of control. The last thing S.H.I.E.L.D. wanted was four cars of heavily armed, mobile operatives following the truck and its cargo to the pickup point.

Maria let the moments pass by, waiting for Heigel’s response.

Then her terminal dinged – incoming message.

_Sight lines fouled. Needed to reset. Clear to take the shot._

Maria read it and felt dread settle in her stomach. What had seemed simple and clear at first suddenly yawned with uncertainty.

“Five minutes out of the engagement zone,” Miri reported. “Are we good?”

“No,” she turned to Gibson. “Get me Hawkeye.”

“Voice?”

“Yes.” She stared at the message and willed it to magically become more than it was. A moment later, Barton was in her ear.

“You rang?”

“Are you in sight of Heigel’s position?”

“If I’m in sight of Heigel’s position, then he’s in the wrong location,” Barton replied, drolly. “What’s up?”

Maria pressed her lips together, tight and tense. She took a breath. “Nothing. Carry on as planned and wait for the security cars to be taken out.”

“Okay, copy that.” There was a moment when she wondered if Barton intended to say something more, before he rang off.

Maria pulled off the headset, and stood, hauling her jacket off the chair so she could drag it on. She yanked up the zip and swept an earpiece off the rack, fitting it into her ear.

“Lieutenant?” Gibson was watching her with alarm.

“Something’s gone wrong with Heigel. I’m taking the bike up to the sniper point.”

“But—Lieutenant—” Gibson looked momentarily bewildered. “Agent Heigel called in—”

Maria pulled a helmet out of one of the storage cabinets in the back of the van. “He didn’t send the urgency acknowledgement.”

“Maybe he forgot?”

Up the front, Miri turned her head briefly. “You’re sure something’s up?”

“‘ _Time Crisis_ ,’” Maria told her, pulling out her ponytail so the helmet would sit comfortably on her head. She plaited her hair with quick fingers, watching Miri over her shoulder.

“ _Three, two, one—GO_!” Miri exhaled. “I hated playing that against him.”

“He would never forget that.” Maria opened the narrow storage space and pulled out the bike – more of a trail bike than a motorbike, small, but powerful enough to get her to where she needed to go. “Something’s gone wrong.”

And the backup they usually had was down with a bad case of food poisoning. _You’ll be alright with one?_ Alan had asked with a frown. _I can assign Lucien if you need._

 _No,_ she’d said, not wanting to pull anyone else off duty. _Matt’s reliable._

“Lieutenant,” Gibson was pale. “Who’s going to run the mission if you go? Shouldn’t I be the one—?”

“Can you shoot a fly off a lightbulb at one hundred yards?”

“I—No. Can you?”

“Now and then,” she said. “Look, I trained at the same time as Heigel, and I’ve a damn better chance of doing so than you. Hold the fort and manage the troops. You know the plan; they know what they have to do.” But Gibson looked terrified – as well he might, she supposed. It was a hell of an op for a newbie. “Agent Gibson?”

“Ma’am?”

“I wouldn’t be leaving this to you if I didn’t think you could do it,” she told him. Firm and assured, no room for doubt. “I’ll need you to activate the tailgate halfway – just so it’s flat and then close up behind me. Keep calm and carry on. Yes?”

“I... Yes, ma’am.”

“Miri, slow it down at the next straight and I’ll jump off. Take it down to fifty if you can.”

Miri snorted. “And they think you’re not a risk taker.”

“Calculated risks,” Maria corrected.

“Still risks. All right. We’re coming up to a straight... Slowing... One hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy, sixty...”

It didn’t feel like fifty to Maria, but Miri was the one with the speedometer.

Gibson had activated the tailgate, and Maria nodded briefly at him. Then she pulled down the visor, kicking the bike into gear, and gunned it out the back of the truck, using the tailgate like a ramp.

The bounce of the bike jarred a little as she hit the tarmac, even though she’d loosened her joints in expectation of the impact. There was a moment when she wobbled, perilously close to losing control of the bike before she wrestled it straight again. She took a moment to get her balance, to take a deep breath and centre herself.

Then she circled the bike around in a tight circle on the empty tarmac and sped off past the van and out into the cool night.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve stood by the open hatch in the back of the Quinjet and told himself that he’d trained for this.

He told himself that this was just like jumping out of a plane into enemy territory – something he’d done often enough with the Howling Commandos during the war.

He told himself that this was exactly what he’d asked for when he’d gone to S.H.I.E.L.D and asked for something suitable for an old soldier to do.

It wasn’t really helping.

The world had changed a _lot_ in seventy years.

When Steve rode out of Central Park after the Chitauri attack on New York, he’d thought he understood how much. Within days of travelling through a world he barely recognised, Steve realised he hadn’t even scratched the surface of it.

And even Peggy hadn’t been able to advise him on it when he went to see her one week later. “ _I’ve grown old with this world, Steve. I’m not seeing it with your eyes – as though the war was yesterday. I remember it, yes – or most of it. But what I remember is...distant. Long ago. I’ve lived a lot of life since then._ ”

Steve had come out of that meeting feeling more alone than ever, but with at least one piece of advice. “ _I know you’re not fond of Fury, but y_ _ou could do worse than work with S.H.I.E.L.D._ ”

There was nothing else for him to do – nothing but drift through a world that had changed and gone on without him. And Steve had never been one to stand still, even before the serum transformed his body and his life.

So he’d called Natasha – the Avenger with whom he felt he’d best connected – and asked for an interview with Fury.

“ _I’m a soldier,_ ” he’d told the director of S.H.I.E.L.D bluntly. “ _It’s all I know how to be_ _. Give me something to do – something suitable for an old soldier._ ”

Fury had given him a long, measuring stare before turning back to his contemplation of the clouds. “ _We’ll start by sending you back to school._ ”

‘Sending him back to school’ had involved training with more branches of the military than Steve had believed existed, from the Navy SEALS to special forces groups in China, and the Australian SAS. He’d learned how to fire modern weaponry, and how to climb an inward corner without handhold, how to laser-paint a target, and how to fly an F-18 to hit that target. He’d learned how to execute an infiltration, and how to take anything a grinning Australian SAS soldier said with a grain of distrust.

He’d learned a little more about the modern world; about computers and phones, the internet and Google, about politics and geopolitics and how the world had fractured into two after he went into the ice – and was fracturing even more as he came out of it.

He’d learned and learned and learned and learned, and at the end of it he’d called Natasha.

“ _Clint and I are still in Europe,_ ” she said. “ _Come for a visit._ ”

And Steve had spent a week with people who didn’t need him to be a hero for them, and felt better for it.

Then the call for this mission had come through.

Now, looking down at the quintet of vehicles travelling below, unaware of the blacked-out Quinjet hovering above them, Steve thought about what he was doing and whether he really wanted to do this.

 _It’s not as though you’re good for anything else,_ he reminded himself. _Other than playing the performing monkey._ And he didn’t much like the prospect of that, either. At least here, he might be doing some good some of the time.

A small, wiry man walked up beside him with a jangle of hooks and climbing harness. He’d introduced himself as ‘Dr. Seuss’, and his dark eyes studied Steve sideways, seemingly amused at Steve’s ambivalence. “You not do this before?”

“Not for seventy years,” Steve admitted wryly. “Things have changed a bit since then. I’ve never rappelled down out of a flying craft onto a moving truck before.”

“Well, I never rappell out of flying craft onto moving truck with superheroes before,” Seuss declared with a tight grin, reaching up to grab the line from the reel above his head. “So first time for me, too.” He turned his head as Natasha came up alongside them, also clad in rappelling gear, all in black, her hair plaited close about her head in an elegant crown. “No sign of sniper?”

“No, and we’re running out of window.”

Something about the way she said it suggested more than just a late shot. “Is he unreliable?”

Natasha shook her head as she reached up to unhook the rappelling line running off the reel overhead. “Clint trained him; he’s good. But Hill asked after him earlier, during check-in.”

“Do you think something’s happened—?”

Steve broke off. Below, one of the four security cars surrounding the convoy swerved away, out of control. It crashed into one of the side barriers and was left behind. A moment later, the second car slowed down, dropping back, although it kept from crashing.

The truck slowed down a little, its brake lights glowing brighter red down on the highway. Natasha pressed a button by the panel which operated the door. “Targets B and E are down, Clint. Take us in.”

“Copy that!”

It was an impressive piece of flying, getting even a Quinjet that low and steady over a moving vehicle. Barton’s flying was as precise as his shooting.

“Targets C and D are out,” Barton said as they came to hover over the truck. “You’re clear to drop.”

Steve yanked on the line, making sure he had enough to clear the edge of the ramp and the bottom of the Quinjet. In his head, he heard his recent instructors barking out the procedure. _Harness, grip, line, slack. Backs to the gap, feet on the edge, check your airspace! T0hen jump backwards and let the line reel out..._

It was only a drop of fifteen yards; it felt like years before his feet hit the top of the container unit, Natasha a second behind him. She pulled her weapons as Steve unhooked her lines and tugged in the pattern to activate the reel-in. He unhooked himself just as Seuss landed, and then unhooked the other guy, too.

“Clint, you’re green to go,” Natasha reported.

“Copy that. Catch you at Stage Two.”

A moment later the Quinjet soared away, banking hard right before vanishing off and into the mountains. Natasha stalked along the container unit, crouched low and staying away from the edges as the truck barrelled along. Steve spread his hands and feet wide as he moved, keeping his centre of gravity as low as he could to avoid falling off, and also to minimise the wind that battered them as they made their way along the unit.

Getting from the container unit to the top of the truck cab involved jumping over a gap of no more than a yard and a half. Natasha made it look easy. Steve wasn’t quite as graceful, but Seuss leaped and needed a hand to gain his balance. They fitted their backs up against the curved windbreaker on the top of the truck cab. Here, at least, the wind factor was minimised.

“Ready?” Natasha asked Seuss.

“Would not, could not in a truck...but the only rhyme I think of is not polite in mix company.”

“Fuck that, then.” Her smile was faint as starlight as she crossed over to the edge of the cabin and reached behind her back to pull out a long black rod. She touched her earpiece as she brought it over her shoulder. Steve moved to the other side of the cab – the driver’s side – and pressed himself against the windbreaker as Natasha reported, “Stage one, phase two, ready to go.”

Steve swung down, holding to the handhold by the door which the drivers used to get up into the cab. He heard the crack of glass, then yanked open the cab door and kicked at the handgun the driver was just bringing to bear on him, before using the slight sway of the truck to swing in. A quick uppercut to the jaw dealt with the driver, and Steve had the wheel a moment later, and the pedals a moment after that.

On the other side of the cab, Natasha had eeled through the window with preternatural agility, having broken the side window glass with the metal rod. The man in the passenger seat lay with his head to one side like a man asleep, but his eyes stared straight ahead, and the holes in his chest gushed, dark and sticky, while the holes in the windscreen whistled sharply as the air blew through them.

“Good shooting.”

“He’s nearly as good as Clint,” Natasha said, already dragging the groggy driver between the seats and into the back of the truck cabin, where a narrow space allowed for somewhere to sleep.

Steve heard the whip of plastic ties being pulled tight as Seuss swung into the cab. It took careful timing, but he relinquished first the wheel, then the pedals, crouching in the gap between the seats.

“What do we do with him?” He asked, indicating the dead man, still sprawled on the passenger seat.

“Toss him out,” Seuss said from the driver’s seat. “He deadweight now.”

“Search his pockets for ID. _Then_ throw him out.” A glance in the back showed Natasha riffling through the trucker’s clothing. “We need anything that might trace back to their employers, because they’re certainly not from the trucking company.”

There was nothing useful on the dead man, so, at Seuss’ instruction, Steve threw the man out of the truck cab at the next curve and slammed the door behind him.

“Won’t someone find him and alert the authorities?”

“Yes.” Natasha handed him a towel to wipe up the blood, coolly matter-of-fact. “That’s not our problem.”

Steve wasn’t entirely comfortable with that – yes, the man was dead, but it seemed…somehow disrespectful to have just tossed him out the truck. It wasn’t something he could explain – and it wasn’t as though he hadn’t done much the same during the war.

It was just…that had been the war. This was…something else.

Still, he’d chosen to come and work with S.H.I.E.L.D – to be of some use, to do something familiar, even if it wasn’t what he knew – he would see the job through, see where it went.

Seuss was informing Operations One that Stage One, Phase Two was complete.

The realisation that Steve hadn’t turned his earpiece on broke him out of his thoughts as he fumbled with the controls. By the time he got it working and settled back in his ear, Operations One had rung off.

“We’re green to proceed?”

“We meet unloading units at depot in quarter hour.”

Steve glanced back at Natasha, who had a small pile of equipment on the floor before her. None of it was anything Steve would have expected to find on a truck driver, even one carrying a questionable load. For starters, both men had worn flak vests – military style, although not bulletproof, as the sniper shots attested.

“Anything on them?”

“Military-grade weapons and equipment,” she said, pulling apart a small black box. “Generic make – or high-end make in generic casing.” Natasha prised the box apart, then tossed him a tiny piece of metal – a chip of some kind - and told him to throw it out the window into the ravine off their right side. “Whoever wanted this shipment went to some lengths to protect it.”

“What I don’t understand is why someone would want a shipment of dead Chitauri. It’s not like they could bring them back to life.” Steve paused, realising he didn’t know that it _wasn’t_ possible. “Could they?”

“Zombie aliens,” Seuss laughed. “New movie for Hollywood!”

“More likely someone wants the soft tissue since the shipment is chilled. Current DNA stripping can get a lot of information out of—” She caught Steve’s look of blank incomprehension. “These days we’ve got the technology to clone living things – or formerly living things. It’s not a perfect science by any means, but someone’s always pushing the boundaries.”

“Why would anyone clone an alien in the first place?” The thought of someone making more Chitauri was incomprehensible to Steve.

“Because he could?” Natasha shrugged as she disassembled a smartphone and picked out a tiny chip, which she handed to Steve to pitch out the window. “People often do things because they can; because they have the knowledge or because they want the knowledge. Because they think the rules don’t apply to them – or shouldn’t apply to them.”

Steve thought of Dr. Zola, of the experiments the Howling Commandos had found in HYDRA base after HYDRA base. He thought of Schmidt, who’d believed himself to be superior in mind, and who’d rushed the first serum because he wanted to be superior in body, too. He even thought of Howard Stark, who’d tried things other men said couldn’t be done, just to see if it could – to show that limits should always be pushed.

“I’ve encountered the type.”

“Then you know how they think,” Natasha said. “Men will do things that shouldn’t be done, simply because they can.” She finished going through the pile of bits and pieces and swept it into a corner. “No identification on them.”

“Did you expect there to be?”

“Sometimes we get lucky. But some of their equipment has specifically-made chips, so we can probably track where they came from, although it mightn’t lead us to the buyer. How far away are we?”

It was just coming up to ten minutes when they rolled down towards the gated depot, where the guards were already lifting the beam gate to let them in.

The unloading dock was brightly lit with a half-dozen people ready and waiting to unload the truck. A dozen more milled around smaller nets, into which the smaller containers holding the Chitauri corpses would be loaded before being airlifted away. In contrast, the rest of the facility was shadows and darkness, although Steve glimpsed the lights of what looked like a Quinjet hovering at one end of the yard, before it soared off into the night.

Seuss backed the truck into one of the loading docks, and even as Steve climbed out of the rig he could hear the clang of the container unit being opened and the creak of the doors swinging back.

Barton strolled up. “Good work. Nothing on them?”

“Nothing immediately identifiable,” Natasha said, landing light on her feet. “What’s our noise factor?”

“Operations control says no one seems to have picked us up yet.” Barton paused. “Gibson’s in charge.”

“Gibson? What’s happened to Maria?”

“Gibson said she was taking care of an issue.”

Natasha frowned. “In the middle of an op?”

“That’s what I was told,” Barton glanced over at the dock where forklifts were moving the pallets of containers out of the chilled shipping container, and taking them over to the goods lift.

“Sajah!” Natasha called to one of the guys at the goods lift, his dark brows lifted in silent question. “Open up the container, check the contents. We’ve encountered dummy shipments before,” she said in normal tones to Steve.

“Our intel was good,” Barton reminded her.

Natasha shrugged. “Better to be sure.”

“Seems to be,” Sajah’s call came. “But you three are experts. You come take a look?”

Natasha went. Barton followed. Steve didn’t – as it was, he could almost taste the dirt and dust of the battle in his mouth, only cleaned out by the ‘shawarma’ Stark had insisted they have together as a celebratory meal.

It wasn’t a bar in Europe or a drink with the Howling Commandos, but it had been enough.

Steve wondered if Natasha and Barton would be amenable to going out for a meal after the mission was done. He could do with a moment of winding down, even if this mission wasn’t as strenuous as they’d first thought it would be—

His earpiece crackled.

“All unit leaders, this is Operations Control.” The voice in the earpiece was young, male, and it wavered a little before the speaker steadied. “We’ve got unknowns heading your way – one airborne and six road—”

A giant fireball suddenly blossomed in the southern sky.

“Okay, then,” said the young man after a stunned, silent moment, “Just six Hummers, all on their way down towards you – ETA ten minutes. Agent Romanoff, will you get the load completed in time?”

Up on the docks, Natasha glanced around before touching her ear. “Negative, Control, we’ve only just gotten the first containers off. And our ride isn’t here yet.”

“Backup is at least twenty minutes away—”

“Backup won’t be necessary. We’ll deal with it.”

There was a moment of silence as the statement was processed. “Very well. Can you effect a complete evac?”

“Yes.” No hesitations, no uncertainties, just one word.

“Do it, then. Um. Control, out.”

“Widow, out.” Natasha jumped down from the raised unloading dock and came across to Steve as the unit leaders began speeding up the unloading process, and Barton pulled out a phone and made a call. “We’ll have to hold them off to start with. Once the unloading’s finished, we’ll have more hands on deck—”

Steve was looking at the yard, at the terrain and the lack of any kind of defense or protection. “What do we have by way of weapons?”

“Handguns, mostly, some small arms. Nothing bigger than an RPG.” Natasha grimaced as she looked up at the sky to where the smoke still hung visible in the sky. “At least their air support was taken out—” Natasha stopped, her expression arrested.

“What is it?”

After a moment she shook her head. “Nothing important. Our best bet is to slow them down, take out the lead, block them from the facility.”

“It’s not an easy space to defend,” Steve began, then paused. “The truck,” he said, suddenly. “We’ll use it as a blockade across the gates once they’ve unloaded it.”

After it was unloaded they wouldn’t need it. It would be a stroke of irony to use their truck against them.

“They’ll still get through—”

“But on foot.” Steve pointed out. “Slow them down, put put Barton high and he can pick them off.”

Natasha nodded. “Tell Seuss.” She touched her earpiece. “Clint, did you get that?”

Seuss raised his eyebrows when Steve called him over. He looked at the truck being unloaded and then at the gates and shrugged. “Can be done. Tell crews to hurry up.”

The work crews were moving along without any need to be told, brisk and efficient. Steve caught the eye of the crew leaders, then grabbed the Special Ops guys and began marshalling them.

“Our best bet is to slow them down,” he said to the ring of men, lifting his voice to be heard as, somewhere not too far away, the Chinook helicopter started its engines. “Hawkeye’s up high – I want our two best shooters up with him, picking them off so they don’t get to the crews working on the shipment. We’re going to put the truck across the entrance so they make better targets. Any other thoughts on how to slow them down in the next five minutes?”

They had ideas and some equipment, and where they didn’t have the equipment, they made things up as they went. Steve listened and approved and sent them off to make it happen.

It wasn’t until the last two guys headed off that it occurred to Steve that they’d looked to him as the leader – even the unit leaders, who were men who had decades more experience than he.

“They obeyed me,” he said, almost wonderingly as Natasha came up.

“You’re Captain America.”

“Yes, but—” Steve didn’t quite know how to put it. Instead of trying, he went over to help close up the shipping container, as, behind him, Natasha gave Seuss the all-clear to start moving the truck.

“They’re here,” said Barton.

Steve glanced up at the road. He couldn’t see anything but he trusted Barton’s eyesight. “Seuss, get that truck moving!”

“Perhaps you care to push?”

Pushing was distinctly unnecessary – with a roar of engine and a wheezing of joints and hydraulic brakes, the truck began its ponderous journey towards the gates. A half-dozen cars, vans, and jeeps had been started up and were idling, and as the truck lumbered across the tarmac towards the gates, they followed, keeping carefully behind it. They’d be making a maze out of the entrance – enough for men to move through single-file, but not enough to bring a carload.

“It’s going to be close—”

Gunfire stuttered, faint above the roar of the truck and the whirr of rotor blades, but too staccato to be anything else. Steve ran for the gates, briefly wishing he had his shield. He’d left it behind in the vaults at European HQ, simply because it was hard to disguise out here and because although they’d anticipated some fighting, they hadn’t expected this.

“How long do you need?” Natasha was close on his heels; Steve nearly answered her before he realised she was talking with the work crews. “Five minutes,” she said. “The last pallet has just reached the ground.”

“We can do five minutes.” They would have to – and then get their people out one way or the other. “Do we have exits—?”

“It’s arranged.”

Seuss was bringing the truck around, but the first vehicle – a black Humvee – was already barrelling through the boom gate. It swerved sideways to avoid the truck, wheels skidding in what Steve recognised was probably a handbrake turn executed by a driving expert.

It cleared the front of the truck by inches, swerving hard enough to leave tracks on the ground as it revved towards the containers being loaded, men hanging out the window, scattering fire.

Steve had already dropped to the ground, his weapon out and aimed at the tyres, the undercarriage – anything that might throw them off-course. The snipers were doing the same but it looked like this Humvee was heavy armour.

A Jeep smashed into it from the far side, driven fast and hard by one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives. It shoved the humvee wide of the loading area, also blocking off the firing from that side of the car. Steve kept shooting and saw a tyre blow out, the rubber shredding swiftly as the vehicle slid to a halt.

The nearest gunner was hanging limply out the window, but his colleagues weren’t behindhand in poking their weapons out the window around him and shooting back.

Steve concentrated his fire on the gap between the body of the gunner and the frame of the window and bought himself enough time to reach the car door.

He yanked the door open, half-dragging the body of the gunner with him, and almost got his head blown off by the gun thrust through the door. As it was, he grabbed the wrist, and hauled the man out with his falling momentum.

The man tucked his shoulder, twisted, and rolled as his gun skittered away across the tarmac. He turned to meet Steve’s rush, and blocked the first blow, then punched back, short and sharp and strong.

Steve fought back, feeling oddly naked without his shield. He was used to having the shield there – projectile and defence both – and while his strength helped, the guy was lithe, slippery as an eel, and fast. Trained to fight, with an odd, sinuous feel to his movements – like a snake coiling for the next strike. Something about the way he moved scratched at Steve’s mind – military-training, maybe?

Shots and shouts rang out all across the parking lot, overlaid by the growing noise of the incoming helicopter.

“Rogers,” Barton said through his earpiece, “drop left.”

Steve dropped. A moment later, so did the man he’d been fighting – a sniper’s hole neat between his eyes.

“Thanks.”

“Help the V-Man hook up the load,” Barton told him. “Time to get the fuck out _._ ”

“Everyone’s got an exit?”

“Nat’s on it; we’re good.” Steve glanced around. S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel were heading for their designated escape vehicles, helping each other along. He saw one of the snipers abseiling down off the roof, before joining three others who vanished into a dark corner of the compound. If Steve recalled the plan correctly, they were supposed to meet up with the command van which should be waiting for them further up the hill.

He ran for the container load as the Chinook came in low, setting down its ramp for people to board.

Natasha was overseeing the boarding, she pointed out one of the Operations guys who’d been hit by a stray shot but was still trying to gather the webbing together and connect the hook to it. “Ma, this is the Widow, tune Cap in....”

“I’ve got it,” Steve told the guy as his earpiece started transmitting the Chinook communications channel. He dragged the webbing into the hook and let the closure spring shut, then waited for the pilot to let him know when to connect. Since he was up the front, where the Chinook was high, he would be last to hook up – and one of the last on board.

A glance around the yards while the middle hooked up found their people going or gone, and Barton shimmying down the abseiling rope, on his way to the helicopter.

Steve got the notice to hook up, and the chopper lowered carefully. In his ear, Natasha reported all their number on, minus Steve and Barton.

Steve flipped open the catch, barely hearing a woman reporting one extra incoming. He got the looped end of the connector in, and snapped it shut. “Chinook One, it’s in.”

“Copy that, Cap.”

Steve was about to jump down when he saw the movement – pale skin in hard yardlight as one hand levered up a pale and sweating face over the hood of one of the Jeeps. A moment later the dark muzzle of a gun was being aimed at Barton’s back as he jogged across the tarmac.

“Barton! Behind you!”

“I’ve got it, Barton. Keep going.”

For a moment Steve was confused as to who’d spoken. Then the motorcycle swept out around the front of the truck they’d hijacked, a graceful swing that the rider controlled one-handed as his other lifted a weapon and shot the man in the back.

Steve jumped down as Barton came up alongside, and paused to give the other man a boost to the ramp. The Chinook was holding position just off the ground and the containers beneath it, not quite lifting up but ready to do so at any moment.

“Get up,” Barton yelled over the whop-whop-whop of the blades. “We’ll pull her up after!”

As Steve hauled himself up, he thought he’d misheard the pronoun. Then he glanced back. The motorcycle had swerved to a stop some twenty yards out from the chopper and the rider was hauling off the helmet. A loose halo of tendrils pulled free of her braid, caught in the downdraft of the helicopter blades.

Definitely a _her_.

Lieutenant Hill climbed off, set the helmet neatly down on the handlebars as though she’d be back for the bike later, then sprinted across the tarmac towards the Chinook, the thing trapped to her back bouncing a little as she ran.

Steve reached down, offering a hand up, and she slapped her hand into his, grabbed for the edge of the ramp and hauled herself up in a single fluid motion.

“Thanks, Captain.” The thanks were brisk, almost perfunctory as she touched her earpiece. “I’m on board, Chinook One. All units, mission achieved. We’re green to get the hell out. We’ll debrief in twelve.”

Barton was staring at her – or, Steve realised, at the thing she wore on her back – long and slightly rectangular: a carry case made to sling over the shoulder. “That’s Heigel’s rig,” he said, and his voice was hard and flat and deadly. “What happened?”

The lieutenant didn’t say anything at first, her hand dipping into her jacket pocket.

Natasha was picking her way back towards them. “Maria?”

Barton went rigid and the assembled units went still as Hill pulled out a long silver chain. Natasha’s mouth pinched as the internal lights glittered over the dogtag, singular, as it swung from Hill’s fingertips.

“I had to take the shots.” Her voice was tight and cold. “Heigel was dead when I got there.”


	3. Chapter 3

Maria wasn’t expecting the glass of bourbon that already sat on the sideboard when she walked into Alan’s office, but she was glad of it.

She drained it in a single gulp, needing the shot of fire down her throat.

The Head of European Operations glanced up from his computer and watched her down the bourbon with a grimace on his face. “The bottle’s in the cabinet,” he said as he continued typing. “Help yourself.”

“It’s a bit early in the day to get stinking drunk,” Maria said as she set the glass down and took a seat across the desk for him. “Tempting though the thought might be.”

Technically, the mission had been a success. They’d hijacked the truck, removed the Chitauri shipment – frozen bodies and packed technology – and gotten it to the S.H.I.E.L.D. lab in Ystad that was waiting to receive it. All other units had reported in on schedule, to full complement. Fourteen injuries – including whiplash when Seuss skidded the truck around – and one death. Maria had been on missions with a far higher bodycount of S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives for far less gain than last night.

Her problem was exactly _which_ man had ended up dead.

She hadn’t told the group exactly how Heigel died, just that she’d found him dead. They hadn’t asked for specifics, accepting her call and her judgement. A clean-up team from Gdansk had acquired Heigel’s body within six hours, and another had scoped out the transfer depot in daylight to see if their enemies had left anything behind.

Bloodstains and tyremarks, but nothing much else. Even the truck was gone.

Maria made a metal note to contact Heigel’s sister in Minneapolis.

Alan had stopped typing and was re-reading what he’d written. He clicked a couple of times, then pushed himself away from behind the table and crossed behind her to close the door.

“It’s never easy to lose an operative—”

“Don’t give me the book lines, Alan.”

“Then don’t rehash the might-have-beens,” he replied, and although his voice was sharp she could hear the sympathy in it. “Could you have done anything?”

She’d asked herself that all the early morning, as the chopper made its way through the brief summer night of the Baltic Sea. Sunrise brought no comfort, although it did bring Natasha to take the tablet from her hands, and Barton to deal her a hand of cards for the next poker round without so much as a word.

“I could have paired him up after Sudor went down with food poisoning.”

“Heigel was reliable. Everyone knew that.”

“They shot him in the head, Alan.” Maria kept her voice steady. “While his back was turned.”

If she closed her eyes she could see Matt’s body where he’d fallen at the foot of the sniper rig, his phone just beyond his hand, his brains spattered all over the promontory he’d chosen for the sighting.

She’d tried not to close her eyes too often on the trip back.

“We could have lost a lot more than just Heigel,” Alan pointed out. “That we didn’t is because you took immediate action.”

She’d expected Alan to take a more impersonal view of it. After all, Matt had been just one of many operatives under his command, while she and Matt had trained together. And this was S.H.I.E.L.D, people died in the line of duty all the time.

Still, there was something he wasn’t seeing – something beyond the stinging loss of a friend.

“They knew where he would be. They knew how the mission was supposed to play out, and that if they took Heigel out, then the plan would fall apart. They had secondary backup on standby when primary security was taken out, and Romanoff tossed at least two passive trackers out of the equipment she took off the guys in the truck. This wasn’t scrambled up fast, it was a tight, well-run counter-operation.”

Alan frowned. “What are you saying?”

“I’d have said Matt was too experienced to be taken by surprise, but someone managed it. He turned his back on them and they took him out – it was a close shot, Alan, not a sniper round.”

“Someone he trusted.”

“It was probably someone we trust, too.” And that was the crux of it. “We’ve got a leak.”

He looked at her, steady blue eyes in a clean-cut face. He was past forty, although his face didn’t show it, and the careless look of youth had deceived many of his opponents through the years. “I know.”

Maria stared at him for a moment, not sure that she’d heard correctly. “You know?”

His expression was resigned. “We’ve been experiencing...issues...in European Operations for the last six months. Pretty much since the New York attack, although I doubt the two are related. Informants have gone missing, attempts to reach them have gone unanswered. Reliable contacts have become unreliable, and at least two operatives died last month under circumstances that I’d have labelled suspicious, but nothing for which I had any proof.”

“Did you mention this to Fury at any stage?”

“Fury’s busy right now,” Alan’s hands clenched briefly on the desk. “He’s got the Council like a monkey on his back, he’s dealing with the loss of the Tesseract and the complete collapse of the Phase 2 project with nothing to replace it, and he’s looking out at a world that’s suddenly realised it’s not alone in the universe and that our worst nightmares might very well be true – that we’re victims waiting to happen.”

“You could have sent the reports.”

“I sent the reports to HQ – as I’ve done every week for the last three months.” Alan’s mouth pinched in at the corners. “I doubt anyone has even looked at them, let alone flagged them for passing on. Europe is perceived as a long way away from the US, and among some at HQ, it might as well be another planet.”

Maria understood. She didn’t like it, but she’d seen it.

Even within S.H.I.E.L.D there was a common perception that S.H.I.E.L.D was an American organisation. In fact it took its mandate from the World Council – an offshoot of the United Nations Security Council among whose aims was the survival of Earth and the human race as a whole. S.H.I.E.L.D as an organisation had existed for over fifty years, but the Mutant Crises at the turn of the century had changed the face of public perception.

An organisation that was dedicated to protecting against the weird and wonderful things of the universe that might threaten Earth was suddenly needed, and S.H.I.E.L.D fit the bill.

Matt Heigel and Maria had been two of the forty-four personnel who’d been recruited in those early drives.

“When Fury set up the helicarrier operations, he took with him most of the people capable of seeing beyond their horizons,” Alan pointed out. “Right now, HQ is staffed with American patriots. Most of them see the world order as a new kind of global Cold War – the US vs. everyone else – and even the attack on New York was more about American rights and the American way of life than about a global threat. A few operations gone belly-up in Europe aren’t of any concern to them.”

“You could have mentioned it to someone else.”

“To who?” Alan asked, bitterly. “You’re hunting Chitauri corpses, Jasper’s neck-deep re-organising the Pegasus facility after it collapsed, and you know Blake doesn’t listen to me. We’ve still got a hunt going for the mercenaries Loki hired through Barton, and Fury’s just one man. There was no-one else to bring it up with – and I didn’t have anything as concrete as a murdered operative, just circumstance.” He exhaled. “And that’s not all of it either.”

She regarded him with some exasperation when he paused. “Well? You’ve got me here, Alan, you might as well get it all out.”

“There’s a strong current of negativity regarding the composition of our ‘frontline defence’ against the aliens and powers that might want to take over the Earth.” Alan picked a pen off his desk, spinning it around his thumb with an ease that Maria had always envied. “Five American citizens and one alien might make for good copy back in the States, but over here...” He shrugged. “I have an agent placed as an aide in the United Nations – one of the Turkish delegates – things are heating up regarding the EU migration. He’s been keeping me updated on the conversations regarding the Chitauri Invasion and specifically the Avengers Initiative. Not all of them are positive, Maria.”

“I know.” As S.H.I.E.L.D. liaison to the Avengers it was her job to know.

She’d read the reports, spoken to the various S.H.I.E.L.D. senior agents worldwide. On US soil, it was all very well to say that the Avengers would save them. But there were questions being raised in the wake of the Chitauri invasion; would S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers have been so fast to move against the threat if, say, it had been Shanghai threatened and not New York City? What about Tel Aviv? Delhi? Johannesburg? Rio de Janiero?

What if the next global threat wasn’t to US citizens on US soil? Would S.H.I.E.L.D. meet the threat? Would the Avengers step in then?

Maria’s answer was instinctively ‘yes’.

But then, she’d been there when Fury made the decision to call up the troops. She’d watched them in the search for Loki, trusting to Phil’s reassurances to assauge her own doubts. She’d seen them fight among themselves, arguing about responsibility and culpability and bloodshed – before they pulled together to get the helicarrier back together.

And she’d watched them learn the price of inaction – not just their own lives, which they’d spend in a reckless instant, but the lives of people who did what needed doing, even if they weren’t official ‘heroes’.

Phil had been the believer. He’d taken Loki’s spear in the chest believing to the last.

Oh, Maria had her doubts about the Avengers Initiative. She’d expressed them to Fury bluntly enough both before and after the Chitauri invasion. But having seen them in action, she trusted that they’d do the right thing by all humanity – when dragged along by the ear, perhaps, but the right thing nevertheless.

She couldn’t blame others for not having that trust.

“ _This_ I’ve said to Fury. He’s not listening,” Alan continued. “Not on this point.”

“He’s from the old school - the one that thought a super-soldier project was a good idea in the first place.”

“Well, you and I both know that’s not the way the world works anymore. This isn’t seventy years ago – or even thirty-seven. It’s a new world and a new world order – and these days, the big countries wielding the big guns can be taken out by a little guy who punches in the right place at the right time.”

“The problem always being where and when the right place and time actually is,” Maria murmured, rubbing her finger around the rim of her glass. “All right. I’ll mention your leak and your observations to Fury – and the problem you’ve been having with HQ. And I’ll assign Agent Gibson to receive and analyse your reports in future. He’s solid, but he could do with broader horizons and a different perspective.”

“I hear he did well tonight.”

“He did. He ran the op after I had to take Heigel’s place, and stayed on top of the situation.” She’d have to remember to mention to the young man that he’d done a good job tonight. Heigel aside, they’d gotten the cargo out with everyone alive. That counted as a good day in S.H.I.E.L.D. If only she didn’t feel like the other boot had yet to drop.

“And Rogers?”

“Him, too.”

Alan arched his brows. “For God’s sake, Maria, don’t _gush_!”

Maria shrugged. “I don’t have to. Romanoff and Barton approved, as did the unit leaders. He was the one who came up with the defense plan. It was good – delay and shut down – and he got Heinkel and Tobrus not only taking his orders but working together.”

Those two had an old rivalry that had once stalled a mission dead. They’d been put on probation and warned after that, and there’d been some sniping since, but nothing major.

“Must be the glamour of Captain America. You know that he’s pretty popular over here.”

“ _Captain America_ is popular in _Europe_?”

“Nostalgia, mostly. Stories from the war.”

“Alan, World War II was seventy years ago!”

“And the stories linger on. Although you might as well call them legends, since they have that flavour about them. Do you know if he’s going to be in Europe much longer?”

“Do I look like Rogers’ social secretary?”

Alan held up his hands as though to ward her off, but he was smiling. “You look like you could do with some downtime – or someone looking after you.”

Maria looked him in the eye. “Are you offering again, Alan?”

“Would you accept this time?”

“No.”

He shrugged, but the smile remained. “Then I’m not offering.” The tilt of the smile turned wry. “Downtime, Mars. I can make it an order if you like. Get out of the office. Sit in a café and read a book instead of a work report. Think about something other than protecting the world.”

“Yes, Alan.”

It wasn’t that her mockery didn’t register, it was that Alan ignored it. “And don’t rehash the mission and whether you could have done anything to save Heigel, either.” His eyes rested on her face, knowing her entirely too well, and understanding her rather more than she liked. “It’s not all on you.”

Maria thought about that as she walked through the offices on her way to pick up her duffle, her gaze sweeping absently over the various agents and data analysts working there. Here and there she caught a curious gaze before someone realised they’d been caught staring and quickly looked away.

_It’s not all on you._

Maybe it wasn’t all on her, but if she didn’t take responsibility for it, who would? If she didn’t act, would anyone else?

In a crowd of people, not all that far from here, one man had stood up to Loki when he demanded obedience. One man had gotten to his feet in protest – Hershel Rosenthal, eighty-seven, child survivor of Dachau. One person out of hundreds.

Rogers’ timely entrance had spared Rosenthal from death, but Rosenthal himself had fought the battle against his own fear and won it.

And wasn’t that the core of it – to overcome one’s own instincts for survival, to be the one to act in the face of danger, even if no-one else was willing to take that risk?

Maria stepped out into the stairwell just as Rogers and a handful of Unit Nine from last night reached the landing. She judged they were headed on their way out for a drink. Clothing was casual – even if Rogers looked like he was about to head in to a country club rather than a bar.

She made a note to tell Clint to introduce Rogers to the idea of modern clothing in the modern world.

Most of the guys filed past with a nod, but the leader of Unit Nine – Todd Sachs – paused by her. “Hey, Hill, we’re heading out for a drink. Come with?”

The invitation was open, easy, but Maria wasn’t in the mood for group drinks right now. “Thanks, but no. Have one for me, and rest up. You guys did good out there.”

“Thanks, Hill. You, too.”

She waited, expecting Rogers to go with them. Going for a casual drink with the guys seemed like the kind of thing Captain America would do - after all, the Howling Commandos had been that kind of a unit. So she was a little surprised when he stepped away from the others, clearly wanting a word with her.

“Rogers?”

“Are you going to take your own advice, Lieutenant?”

Expecting a work-related question, Maria was caught off-guard. She glanced away and caught Sachs watching them as he went down the stairs. One brow quirked in silent question and she shook her head in equally silent answer before she looked back at Rogers and tried to remember what the hell he’d asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Are you going to rest?”

Maria was abruptly reminded of a thought she’d had weeks ago during the aftermath of a night out with Natasha and several other women. The night had started off awkwardly social, and ended in bloodshed - none of theirs, although half a bar of civilians had died simply for being in the way. Worse yet, they’d never caught whoever was behind it – someone who’d been looking to get hold of Dr. Foster for some kind of medical experimentation.

And Maria had been – very briefly – injured while impersonating Doc Foster.

It had been a moment or two of dizziness after being shot with a very mild tranq – nothing to write home about. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought if Rogers hadn’t behaved as though she was about to faint and insisted she see the medical personnel on the scene.

It tripped off her tongue with an ease born of exhaustion, adrenaline, and alcohol. “Are you going to bulldoze me again, Captain?”

He blinked at her, stunned, then grinned. “Depends. Do you need a bulldozer?”

The noise of Sachs and the rest of Unit Nine cut off as the door out of the stairwell closed behind them. And the excitement of the previous night, the lingering sense of failure over Heigel’s death, and the bourbon she’d had in Alan’s office caught up with Maria.

She looked Rogers over, from handsome, clean-cut face down the length of his perfectly-proportioned body and back up again. And arched her brows. “Maybe I need a sex toy.”

He flushed, pretty much as she’d expected. Panic flashed across his features. “Um. Okay. Well, that’s—I’m—” He stopped and studied her. “You’re joking aren’t you?”

Maria felt her mouth twitch in spite of her best efforts to keep a straight face. Maybe it wasn’t nice to tease him like that, but it _was_ fun. “More or less.”

“More? Or less? Wait, don’t answer that. It’s probably better that I don’t—” Rogers shook his head, the flush not quite fading from his cheeks. “Can we start this conversation over again? Please?”

She snorted, tired and not quite up to keeping her amusement leashed. “I’ll rest, Rogers. I’ve already been given directions to the effect of ‘go out, take the afternoon and evening off, do not pass GO, do not collect $200 guilt.’”

“Fury?”

“Alan. Agent Thorpe,” she qualified when he frowned. “As you can see, I have bulldozers in my life already and don’t need another.”

“Good,” Rogers said. And blushed again. “I mean, I’m glad you already have enough people ‘bulldozing’ you. Because I was going to ask if you’d come out to dinner with me, and I figure you’ll more likely say ‘yes’ if you don’t think I’m bullying you into it.”

It was her turn to stare at him.

And he just stared right back, those scarlet flags tinging his cheeks beneath the frank gaze.

“Dinner?” Maria repeated, just to be sure she hadn’t misheard him.

“Fondue, actually.” The smile he quirked carried a hint of sadness. “Seeing as we’re in Lucerne.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm off to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier this morning. We'll see how it affects future chapters.

The restaurant Lieutenant Hill recommended for fondue was small, old-fashioned and not very far away from the office.

Clint would have termed it ‘kitschy’, but the waitstaff spoke with European accents rather than American ones, and Steve rather liked the décor - wooden panelling, photographs that didn’t look like postcard-fodder, and a nice, comfortable feel to it.

In the fall midafternoon it was mostly empty – only two other tables had people at them, and Hill explained that this was the afternoon lull. “By dinner they’ll be packed out.”

The server returned with their drinks – a beer for him, a hard cider for her – and Hill ordered the cheese fondue for four.

“If you want more, we can get more,” she explained to Steve. “But you might want to see how much there is to start with and work it from there.”

“I trust your judgement.”

Her mouth quirked as she picked up the bottle and tapped it against the beer mug. “A job well done.”

As he drank, Steve reflected that she didn’t sound like she believed it. A fragment of conversation surfaced – Natasha as they headed off to the debriefing. _Heigel trained under Clint,_ she said. _Along with Hill._

Which explained why Barton had been quiet and closed-in for the flight up to Ystad, his usual garrulousness absent.

“I’m sorry about Heigel.”

Hill was peeling the label off the bottle. She dropped her hand to the table like a child caught doing something she shouldn’t. “We go into this business knowing the risks,” she said. “To others, as well as ourselves.”

Steve thought about letting that statement go at face value. Only, he’d seen her tuck the dogtags carefully away, dripping the silver chain into the inside pocket of her flak jacket with something that seemed almost like grief. When she looked up, her expression was cool and distant, but he remembered the gesture.

“Were you close?”

“No. Matt was a loner for the most part – I don’t know that he’d have called me a friend.”

“But you’d have considered him one?”

One shoulder twitched in a sort-of shrug.

“Sometimes,” he said after a moment, “it’s enough to have people who know who and what you are, and with whom you don’t have to be anyone else.”

“Bucky Barnes?”

He should have expected she’d flip the tables on him. He decided not to point out they’re talking about her, not him. “Among others.”

“Not the Avengers?”

“No.” The answer was instinctive before he paused. “Not all of them.”

Hill nodded briefly. “Matt was a loner for the most part. We joined S.H.I.E.L.D in the same year – a recruiting push after the Mutant Crisis in 2000, and 9/11. He turned out to be really good at taking the shot, and I turned out to be really good at setting up the shot before taking the shot, so Barton trained us both.”

“I thought you started out in the Marines?”

“I did.” When Steve just looked at her, Hill sighed. “I did three years, then applied to join the Navy SEALs. My scores were within parameters for entry to the program, and I was willing to accept no special treatment.”

“You wanted to join the Navy SEALS?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” She tilted her head. “You can say it if you want. It’s true, I’m a woman.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking.” Her expression invited him to continue, and after a moment he did. “You’d have made a good SEAL.”

“But?”

Steve looked her in the eye. “You’d have been wasted as a Navy SEAL. They wouldn’t have known what to do with you.”

Hill studied him for a moment. “You mean that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” When it didn’t look like she was going to answer, he prompted her again. “Joining S.H.I.E.L.D?”

“I applied for the SEALs. They kicked me back. My commanders encouraged me to take leave – we were stationed out in South-East Asia at the time – and a mixed group of marines were headed out for some R&R at a local port city called Madripoor.”

The name sounded familiar, but Steve couldn’t immediately place it. “And you came to S.H.I.E.L.D’s notice?”

“More or less. I came to the notice of former Director Carter during an incident in Madripoor.”

“Madripoor…” Memory sparked at the mention of Peggy. “Wasn’t that the place with the city-wide takeover by H.Y.D.R.A.? The one that was averted with the asssitance of a marine…” He stopped and stared at the woman sitting opposite him, sipping her beer. “That was you?”

“I am not permitted to either confirm or deny.”

Perhaps the slight tilt of her head was mocking, but Steve wasn’t sure – he didn’t know enough about her to be sure. Still, he was curious. The Madripoor Reconfiguration wasn’t fully disclosed to his security level – not without the appropriate authorisations from Fury, anyway. Steve hadn’t seen the need in to ask for clearance then.

He would definitely be asking the next time he logged into S.H.I.E.L.D. systems.

Their meal arrived and food temporarily dismissed all other considerations. There was a pot with a little gas fire underneath it, a platter of vegetables, and a basket of bread pieces. The main server – the one who’d brought their drinks – explained things in accented English – how not to lose their food in the fondue, how to turn off the fire when they were done.

They were asked if their drinks needed refreshing, and the answer was ‘no’.

“Enjoy,” said the woman, smiling in Steve’s direction.

He smiled back. “Thank you. I’m sure we will.”

She left, blushing prettily.

When Steve looked back Hill was fitting a piece of bread on the end of her fondue fork. Somehow she managed to convey the air of a smile without actually smiling. “I should ask Barton if he’s kept track of how many hearts you’ve broken so far.”

His first instinct was to deny; his second to bristle.

“I was being polite,” he said. “The world might have changed but I haven’t.”

“Hackles down, Captain. I was just...amused.”

Steve thought she could at least have been amused without telling him.

The fondue was...good. Simple, rich, and tasty, with a hint of wine to it.

The conversation...well, that was a little scant. He gathered that Maria Hill wasn’t the talkative sort. And she didn’t seem to feel the need for conversation, even with him. However, by the time she’d slowed down to the occasional piece of bread or vegetable, Steve figured he could try asking a few questions of his own and listen to the answers while he finished the rest of the meal.

“Why’d you come to dinner with me?”

“Why did you ask me?”

He told her the truth – or most of it. “Because Barton and Natasha weren’t available and you looked like you could do with company.”

“And you’re a good judge of when I look like I need company?”

“Apparently.” At her raised eyebrow, he indicated the restaurant around them. “You came out.”

“Maybe I was humoring you.”

“I can’t imagine you humoring anyone, least of all me.”

She watched him for a moment, as though measuring him by some internal standard of which Steve had no concept. Then she dropped her gaze to the table where she slid her finger through the circles of condensation she’d so carefully marked out.

“A lot of our agents and operatives have a post-mission habit. Unit Nine, for instance, goes drinking. Most senior pays for first round – another reason Sachs asked me – and then whoever did the most stupid thing during the mission. After that, it keeps going as long as there are people to buy rounds and people to drink.”

The Howling Commandos had always gone for a beer after a mission, Steve remembered. A pub in London, a burned out bar in Paris, once, even a home brew in a little town some fifty miles out of Bastogne.

Hill was still talking. “It varies by operative, team, and even mission. Barton and Romanoff go out for karaoke if it’s available; a meal if not. The Avengers went for shawarma after New York.”

“I don’t know that once makes a habit.” Although it had been...comforting in a way. Something to do that didn’t involve saving the world, something entirely new – the breaking of bread with friends, or people who could be friends, given time. “Karaoke?”

“Sing-alongs. The music is background and you get up on stage and start singing. The idea came from Japan.”

“Like...a show?”

“Not exactly.” She tilted her head. “Romanoff and Barton haven’t taken you along yet?”

“No.” Something about the way she said it... “Should I be grateful?”

“Have you ever heard Natasha sing?”

“No.”

“Be grateful. There are plenty of things that the Black Widow excels at; singing is not one of them.”

He grinned at her droll tone. “The secret lives and times of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. So, if that’s their post-mission habit, what’s yours?”

“Why can’t it be this?” Her gesture encompassed the restaurant, the fondue, and Steve.

“It could be.” Steve dipped another piece of bread into the fondue. “I just didn’t figure you to be... social... after a mission.”

“Or possibly at all?”

“Not with me, certainly.”

She tilted her head. “You either have a really bad opinion of yourself or a really bad opinion of me, and I’m not sure which I’d prefer.”

Steve opened his mouth. Then shut it. “Is there any possibility of this conversation ending well if I continue down this path?”

Her mouth twitched, a fractional softening. “No.”

He grimaced at himself and mopped up the remnants of cheese in the pot before contemplating the remaining bread and chopped vegetables. He wasn’t hungry anymore – he’d eaten a very comfortable portion. But the meal didn’t feel quite finished.

Hill cleared her throat. “Dessert?”

“What did you have in mind?” Steve had always had something of a sweet tooth, and the modern world had turned out to be perfectly positioned to satisfy it.

“Chocolate fondue?”

He blinked. “You can get fondue in chocolate?”

Hill’s mouth curved, and she lifted her head to catch the waitress’ attention.

Steve stared.

It was just a quirk-lipped smile, not a full-on grin, but the effect was...unexpected. Her expression softened, and the proud, serious commander became an utterly stunning dame. If she ever grinned – no qualifications, no hesitation, she’d stop men in their tracks.

Which was probably why she didn’t.

_I guess I just don’t know why you’d want to join the army if you’re a beautiful dame._

Peggy’s reasons for joining the army had been exactly the same as his; there was injustice in the world, she could help eradicate it. But the limitations placed on her couldn’t be fixed by a serum – only by time and open minds.

And even seventy-plus years later, the minds were only so open.

As she ordered dessert, not responding to the waitress’ double-take at how much they’d already eaten, Steve decided he was definitely going to take a closer look at the Lieutenant’s file when he got back to S.H.I.E.L.D.

He ordered another beer, she ordered a light beer. The waitress cleared the table and took the dishes away.

Silence fell.

Steve glanced up and realised she was watching him, as though just by staring at him she could read his mind. “Why fondue?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you invited me to dinner, you specified fondue. Why?”

As he told her about that first mission against orders, flying with Peggy and Howard to rescue the 107th, it occurred to Steve that this was the first personal question she’d asked him all night. And when the hinting smile eased the harsh angles of her features as she realised he hadn’t known what fondue was when Howard made his suggestion to Peggy, Steve felt a warm curl of pleasure in his chest.

She’d started to relax around him. Not the superior humouring a subordinate, but something approaching colleagues of equal footing.

She asked a few more questions about the Howling Commandos, about Bucky and Peggy and Colonel Phillips. He discovered she’d met Dum Dum and back in her first days with S.H.I.E.L.D, and Jim Morita even before that. Apparently, Jim had been in Madripoor when she took control of it – ‘visiting’ just like Peggy – and Steve mentally noted that if he wasn’t given clearance for the full Madripoor Reonfiguration file, then he might be able to access at least Jim’s report on it.

The chocolate fondue came out, and they made short work of it. This time, Maria ate her fair share, even down to licking a droplet up when it fell on her wrist.

Steve bit back a grin, although not quite fast enough to avoid being seen.

“It’s chocolate,” she defended.

“Lieutenant Hill’s weakness?”

“The new agents are told that I can be sweetened with chocolate when they first arrive.” She swirled a strawberry in the chocolate. “The clever ones don’t try it until they’ve earned my respect.”

“Respect first, then bribery.” Steve grinned as she bit into the piece of fruit. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

The chocolate fondue provided the finishing touch to the meal. And once the pot was quite cleaned out, Steve leaned back in his chair.

She wasn’t what he’d been expecting. She wasn’t what he’d been led to expect either.

Not that Nat or Barton spoke badly of her. There was respect there, the cool appreciation of two deadly operatives for someone who comprehended their capabilities and used them to the full. But he hadn’t met anyone who thought of her affectionately since Coulson.

He hadn’t noticed the woman at the helm of the helicarrier to begin with – he’d been too focused on the view and Fury and finding the Tesseract. But it soon became clear that if she didn’t speak much, her eyes missed very little.

 _Agent Maria Hill,_ Coulson had said, drawing Steve’s attention away from the woman who was down in the technical pits, asking questions about a reading anomaly with piercing attention. _Or, really, Lieutenant, now. They gave her a new rank so she could command the helicarrier. A good agent._

It wasn’t much, but the affection was clear. Steve had wondered a little, but shaken himself. Even back in the war, you found people who developed… ties. Connections that were stronger than blood and not about sex. In an organisation like S.H.I.E.L.D, secretive and close-lipped, it was no surprise that an older agent might start thinking of a younger agent as a daughter or a favourite niece.

“Have I grown another head?”

“No.” Steve wondered if he should say anything. “Just another aspect.”

Her brows rose, and she tilted her head. “Am I better off not knowing?”

“Coulson.” He said and watched the easy amusement in her expression tense and stiffen. “He spoke well of you on the helicarrier.”

Her mouth pressed into a thin line before she relaxed a little. “High praise.”

“You were close?”

“He was one of my trainers.”

“But you don’t know that he’d have called you a friend?”

“Touche.” Maria’s mouth twitched at the echo of what she’d said about Matt. “In case you haven’t realised, Captain, Coulson was always a believer.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“I say it as someone who got the benefit of the doubt in his belief.”

“After Madripoor, I can’t imagine many people doubting you.”

“Well, there was always the possibility that I was a one-hit wonder.” Maria shrugged. “S.H.I.E.L.D is more open-minded about women – but people were still cynical.”

“Are they taking it back now you’re Fury’s 2IC?”

“There are always holdouts.” Her head tilted a little, eyes narrowing. “You wanted to know why I’m the Avengers liaison?”

Steve hadn’t said as much, but the truth was, “I’m curious.”

“Someone needed to do the job, and I was what Fury had to hand.”

“Let me guess: you’re not intimidated by Stark, not scared of Banner, and not awestruck by me?”

This time the twitching smile was faintly sardonic. “If I was before, I’m not now.”

“Sorry, did I chew with my mouth open?”

“Well, I didn’t want to draw your attention.” She looked up as the waitress came around, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear.

“Hello. Is everything okay? The kitchen is closing in five minutes and it won’t be open again until dinnertime.”

“Oh, we’re done,” Steve said. “At least, I am.” He looked at Maria, but she was reaching for the purse she’d tucked to the side.

“We’ll get the check, please.”

Steve started to object, reaching over the table to put his hand over hers. “Will you let me get it?”

She didn’t quite pull her hand back, but she did still for a moment, before pulling away, warm soft skin sliding out from his touch. “Captain, it’ll only end up in the same expenses account.”

“It’s... It would make me feel better about it. Seeing as I ate most of the meal.”

Her exasperation showed in the twist of her lips and the sharpness with which she put the card away, but Steve didn’t let that bother him as he fished out the card S.H.I.E.L.D had given him for his expenses.

It just felt wrong to be having a meal with a woman and letting her pay the bill. Even if it did all end up in the same expense account.

He paid the bill and they climbed out of the booth.

Steve didn’t realise he was running on automatic until Maria stepped away from him, turning to face him, her gaze wary. “Captain?”

He’d moved to help her into her jacket – a small, sleek thing of red-dyed leather with a ‘mandarin’ collar. He’d done it without thinking, the movements automatic.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was going to help you—It’s a habit.”

Hill looked like she was thinking of a lot of things to say as she settled her jacket more comfortably on her shoulders, slipping her fingers along the inside collar to clear her hair out of the way. It occurred to Steve that he’d never done this for Natasha – possibly because Natasha rarely took her jacket off in restaurants. And possibly because Steve hadn’t yet had a dinner with Natasha where he’d paid the bill – when out with Barton and Natasha, they usually split the bill three ways.

It wasn’t as though he’d done this – dinner with a woman – all that often ‘back home’. It was just that, with dinner and the conversation of a beautiful dame, paying for the meal...

“You haven’t dated in this century yet, have you?”

“Do Natasha and Barton count?” Steve paused to make sure he’d caught her gaze. “Does this?”

He got a very sharp, very steady look. “Let’s go.”

Steve held the door open for her on the way out. That was just politeness. The world had changed; he hadn’t.

Still, a little part of him wondered: would he offer to see her home? Ask if she’d invite him in? How did these things even work now that it was seventy years after he’d learned the moves?

Standing out on the pavement in the slanting sunshine, Hill seemed to be contemplating her exit routes. She looked down the street, first one way, then the other. Then she turned back to him, her shoulders set. “I trust I answered some of your doubts to your satisfaction?”

He winced. He couldn’t help it. “I...was hoping not to be that obvious.”

The grin was quick and unexpected, bright and feral. Steve felt a jolt - as though she’d just bared her teeth at him in a good-natured challenge.

“You gave it away when you asked me to have dinner with you.”

“I’ll...try to be more subtle next time.”

Maria shook her head, the grin fading to a light smile. “It’s a pleasant change to deal with someone whose motives aren’t concealed.”

Steve took a gamble, his hands carefully tucked in his pockets, standing rather closer to Lieutenant Maria Hill than he usually would. “So what about you? Your motives in having dinner with me?”

She stared at him for a long moment, filled with the footsteps of passers-by, the whirr of bicycles wheeling past, and the soft hum of car engines making their way through the town’s streets. There was a moment when Steve thought she might ignore the question entirely.

It felt like a long, measuring moment before she said, “You asked what I usually do after a mission.”

“Yes.”

“I usually find a quiet place, and hole up with a glass of wine and a good book.” Blue-green eyes met his and this time the smile was brief and civil and polite. Putting him back in his place. “This was a pleasant substitute.”

“So...same time, same place, next mission?”

The curve of her mouth deepened just a fraction. “Good night, Captain.”

And with no more ado, she stepped off the pavement and into the street, weaving her way through the traffic to the other side, leaving Steve watching her with a sense of bemusement.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's this and one more chapter, and then we're out in the woods with no knowledge of how we get home!

_She sprinted through twisting canyons of ice-cold rock, right and left and then right again, her boots scrabbling on the loose stones of the path as she changed directions. Darkness all around her with only the faint sheen of stars above, casting thin light down on the craggy, pitted surfaces of the rock, the faintest shimmer to guide her through the dark._

_Cold and tired, so cold and so tired, the ache in her ankles from too many direction changes, the biting pain in her side a stitch that said she hadn’t been keeping her fitness up._

_But when did she have time in the life she led?_

_She turned to look back at what pursued her. She knew she shouldn’t –_ never turn when running, just run! _But she had to see – she had to know what hunted her through her dreams..._

_Nothing. Darkness and shadows clinging to cold, craggy rock, silent and still. Nothing but the prickle of her senses._

_But they were there. She could sense them – on the edge of perception, like the faintest hum of electrical power, like the whisper of voices in rustling wind._

_They leaped, out of nothing, taking on form and teeth and claws._

_She lifted her bare hands, prepared to fight them off._

_And was swallowed whole._

–

Fury listened with narrowed eye as Maria reported in on the Gdansk mission, Heigel’s death, and Alan’s frustrations, tapping his fingers on his desktop every now and then.

She didn’t report on the dinner with Rogers. That didn’t come under the heading of S.H.I.E.L.D operations, and so was none of Fury’s business.

“You think Gibson can handle reviewing Europe?”

“He’ll do a better job than HQ have been doing.”

“Noted. I’ll look into rearranging the rosters, then.” Fury glanced out his window at the bright clouds sailing past them in the blue, blue sky. “You’re sure Thorpe can handle the leak?”

“If he can’t, he’s got no business being head of European Operations,” Maria pointed out dryly. “Plus, he’s been frustrated by HQ and that usually lights a fire under his butt.” There was nothing like being thwarted to make the goal that much sweeter.

Her boss was giving her the measuring look that suggested he knew a damn sight more than he was going to say. Maria looked back. Her relationship with Alan was very old news, and if not exactly approved, certainly not forbidden. And whatever they’d been to each other in the past, it had little to no bearing on their interactions now.

“How did Rogers go?”

“Practically perfect in every way. Warring unit leaders laid down their arms and marched beneath his banner, and Romanoff and Barton approve.”

“Droll. Now without the sarcasm.”

Maria bit back a smile and got serious. “He did fine according to the reports from the team leaders. Worked well with Natasha and Seuss, thought of a way to buy the loading crews time, and got everyone moving in the same direction. Capable, flexible, and both able to take orders and give them.”

She thought of conversations over fondue and the quiet ember of that personality – not as flamboyant and unstable as Tony Stark, but just as powerful should something fan it into flame. A dangerous man for all that he seemed harmless enough – both professionally and personally – but a useful one to S.H.I.E.L.D.

It had been gratifying to be the focus of his attention for those two hours over fondue, but she wasn’t about to let it go to her head. She’d accepted his to dinner to get a better grip on the man and not the legend – just as he’d invited her to learn more about the upper eschelons of the organisation he’d be working for. There was nothing more to it.

“If we need him for anything,” she said now, “I’d recommend rescue missions – grey Ops at the most, no wetwork. He’d kill a man in a fair fight, but he’d need a damn good reason to knife a man in the back. And his good reasons aren’t likely to be Romanoff or Barton’s good reasons.”

“Noted.” Fury sat up and pulled a tablet over, tapping through it with practised ease. “I’m glad to hear you approve of him since I called him in this morning to join you and the team checking out the Yukon facility.”

_Ave Maria, gratia plena..._

It was a moment before Maria could think to take the proffered tablet with hands that were suddenly icy cold. “What’s happened?” The Yukon facility wasn’t due for a check for another month.

“They’ve been reporting issues with their security logging system in the last week – power-outs, delays to the backup generator, odd sensor reports. Each time they got everything back up online within five minutes, and performed a security check.” Fury indicated the report on the tablet. “There’s been power outages in the broader area, so it wasn’t deemed significant until ten hours ago when the power in the area went down and didn’t come back up. The helicarrier’s close enough that I’m sending you, Walters and his team, and Rogers to look into it.”

“Is including Rogers wise, sir?”

_I’m willing to work with S.H.I.E.L.D. At least for the moment._

“It might be best to make sure he knows the worst of it now. Stark may not have managed to unearth all S.H.I.E.L.D’s skeletons, but there’s no telling.”

“The lawsuit against Stark Industries?”

“Working its way through the torturous legal process of Ms Potts’ cunning,” came the reply. “But on the matter of Rogers, it’s better to have him onside and angry then offside and angry. And this can be worked to get him onside.”

Maria looked up, met her boss’ gaze, and understood what was expected of her.

\--

She gave the briefing on the flight out, the team of twelve, plus Rogers and herself, filling up the passenger cabin of the Quinjet.

Rogers had been last in. “ _Sorry. I didn’t realise there are two Quinjet bays on this thing_.” He was still reading the brief on his tablet as Maria checked their ETA.

“Two hours,” drawled Dom McCann, “And before you ask, Hill, we can’t give her anymore or she’ll blow.”

Maria rolled her eyes at the accent, usually broad Australian, now a mangled Scottish. “Don’t quit your day job, Dom.”

“He’d be mad to try,” said Master Sergeant Walters as he came up beside Maria. “Stand-up’s a bitch.”

“So’s being shot down,” noted Dom cheerfully. “Which isn’t going to happen, of course.”

“Of course.”

Walters snorted. But he turned to her, and his measuring gaze was anything but amused.

“Yes, Master Sergeant?”

“You’re good to go?”

“Yes.” No hesitation, no room for manoeuvring – if she gave Walters an inch, the old vet would fret a mile.

She wasn’t a newly-minted agent anymore. She had ten years of experience in S.H.I.E.L.D under her belt. She’d taken down criminal warlords, and fought monsters of both the human and non-human variety. She’d managed men, mutants, and superheroes with a titanium will and an adamantium fist, and she’d seen more friends die or burn out than she’d spent nights in her apartment.

Walters arched one brow, as though he could nudge her into admitting her unease; but she just stared back.

He shrugged. “There’s no shame in the struggle, kid.”

Maybe not shame, but certainly not something she dared show. Maria crossed over to her empty seat next to Rogers who glanced up as she reached down to pull out her tablet.

“So, did you ever get around to reading that novel after being interrupted with dinner?”

“No. I went back to quarters and flaked out.”

Not that it had stopped the dreams.

_Running, cold and tired – she’d been cold and tired all her life..._

The look he gave her suggested he was on the verge of telling her she looked like she needed more sleep. The look she returned him suggested he’d better not.

Instead he indicated the tablet and asked, “An experimental test lab in the seventies?”

“Post-Vietnam. The Vietnam War,” she specified, when he blinked.

“Right. What were they experimentally testing?”

“Humans.” Maria didn’t lie or dissemble; he’d find out soon enough. Nothing was guaranteed to put his back up more than the discovery that they’d been hiding things from him – especially this. “They were trying to replicate the super-soldier serum. Thirty Vietnam vets signed up for the program.”

_...blood-spatter stained the snow as a hand squeezed her throat with gentle, brutal strength and the barrel of the gun pressed against her temple..._

She shook the memory away as Rogers asked, “Why was it shut down twice?”

“It was re-opened in the early noughties – we think around 2000.”

“You think?”

“The records are vague. Deputy Director Boyle authorised Perseus without Fury’s approval, and it only came to light when he died in a car accident a few years later.”

“An accident?”

“Actually an accident.” Maria wasn’t surprised that he’d ask. Working with S.H.I.E.L.D was not the same as trusting S.H.I.E.L.D. “Drunk driver crossed over to the wrong side of the road. Boyle avoided the drunk, but clipped a pole and met a tree trunk. When we started tidying up his files, we discovered whole projects being run on the quiet – this was one of them.”

“And you shut it down.”

“Yes. We suspect that the facility was re-opened because of the Mutant Crisis in 2000.”

Rogers nodded, scrolling through the project notes. “And in the seventies? Why did it take so long for them to open it in the first place? I mean, they wanted more of me back during the war – I can’t imagine they put it all on hold for thirty years.” Blue eyes fixed on her. “Unless they didn’t.”

“They did. Between Director Carter, Howard Stark, and Colonel Phillips, the project was kept on ice for thirty years. Then the SSR became S.H.I.E.L.D, Phillips died, and Director Carter went off active duty.”

“And Howard was busy building weapons of mass destruction.”

Maria wondered that he didn’t see it, but then, she supposed, he had a particular blind spot on the matter of weapons vs. soldiers. She’d thought it obvious once she understood Howard Stark’s history with Captain America. But that wasn’t the question at hand.

“It was rumoured the Soviets had started up a super-soldier program, and S.H.I.E.L.D. was still very Americentric at that time. Nothing would do but try to bring the project back up again.”

“A different kind of arms race.” Rogers’ smile held elements of bitterness. “From what I understand of the war with the Soviets, shouldn’t they have kept it open? Why would they close it down?”

“According to the official report, it ran too long, cost too much, and produced no significant results.”

“And the unofficial report?”

“You’ll have to ask Director Fury for his opinion on that. He was an active agent at the time; he’s more likely to remember it.”

Considering she hadn’t even been born the first time the project was closed down, she had no first-hand knowledge of what had been going on. By the time she got involved, some twenty five years later, it was a very different project in a very different world.

“And what are they experimentally testing now?”

He knew the answer wouldn’t be the one he feared, but the quiet lethality with which he asked the question said clear as day he feared the answer.

“Nothing. These days it’s _just_ research.” Maria made the emphasis with care, watched his eyes narrow in distrust. “They’re not authorised for human testing, and a very close watch is kept on everything going in and coming out. Nobody’s eager for another Hulk or another Abomination.”

There was a moment when she wasn’t sure he’d believe her, but he nodded.

Trust at face value. It was a start.

“And their facility went off-line this morning.” Rogers nodded to himself and turned off the tablet, tucking it back into its pouch under the seat. “We’re sure it’s not just a power-outage?”

“A satellite passed over it three hours ago and everything looked quiet. If it was just a power-outage, they’d have grabbed one of the generators to uplink and send a reassurance code.” Maria activated the 3D function on the tablet and pulled up the schematics of the facility. “There are two entrances into the facility – the front door and the garage, through which deliveries come. The facility itself is mostly underground – from the air, it looks like a bunker.”

Around them, the operation teams turned to look at the facility layout. Walters wandered over and regarded it sourly.

“Let’s hope the welcoming committee is friendlier than last time.”

\--

In fact there was no welcoming committee at all.

The doors into the facility were closed, but the locks were open – Sanchez input the appropriate codes and they all heard the snap of the locks as they closed up, sealing them into the facility.

Sanchez unlocked it again, and Heddy and Suki went outside to make contact with the Quinjet and let them know that they’d made it into the facility and all was green so far.

Considering the facility had been incommunicado for nearly two days by now, Maria wasn’t taking any chances. Every step would be transmitted, everything they found would be relayed, and if they went down to something inside, then at least anyone coming after would know what had already been tried.

“What information do we have?” Corporal Exley was booting up security with a mini generator they’d brought along and assembled for just this purpose, and was using S.H.I.E.L.D. codes to get into the system, seated at the desk in the security room.

“Not much,” said the tech, flicking a forelock out of her face. “Power’s been up and down the last few days – all logged. Other than that, everything was normal until 1800 hours last night.” She scrolled through the security reports – to be logged every hour with any security or facility details. “Someone came up and found the garage trashed, the alarm system in there disabled. There was no sign of damage other than the destruction of all the vehicles capable of making it to the nearest town, and all the other alarming systems into the building were green.”

“Lieutenant, we’ve got entry...”

Maria held up a hand to halt him, waiting for the rest of Exley’s story. “And?”

“And that’s it.” She clicked around a couple of times and typed in a command before shaking her head. “The entries just stop. I’ll pull up the security feeds, but it’ll take some time to go through...”

Rogers frowned. “Even if something went wrong,wouldn’t they have time to put out a mayday?”

“Lieutenant!”

An icy gust of wind accompanied Heddy as he burst back inside, not giving the antechamber outside door time to cycle closed, his face pinched and serious from both the wind and his news. “We found security.”

They’d been dumped out in the snow like so much trash, their frozen limbs akimbo against the white drifts into which they’d frozen solid. The drifts had disguised them as the S.H.I.E.L.D. unit walked in to the facility, but Suki had gone to investigate the odd-shaped drift on a hunch.

Rogers knelt down by the nearest man. “No wounds, no bloodstains visible.” He glanced up at Maria. “There was no blood spatter in the entryway, either – no sign of injury.”

“Tranked,” Maria said with grim certainty. “Then hauled out here and left to die so they couldn’t give the scientists inside any warning.”

“And transport cut off by destroying the garage.”

“They wanted the facility. They wanted the scientists and their research.” She turned on her heel, heading back inside and calling the whole unit over. “Exley and Sanchez stay upside to keep an eye on things, we’ll relay through them every step of the way. I want everyone on full-alert, this is a Code Four.”

Code Four - a location takeover.

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the facility’s communications were down when they came in – had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that nobody got a warning out – or that the people inside had no idea of what was coming.

Maria suspected the scientists inside were already dead or gone, along with whoever had attacked this facility. Someone who staged a break-in like this was efficient – they got what they needed and they got out. They didn’t linger or grandstand.

They were fast and quick and fatal – like a knife to the heart or a bullet to the brain.

“ _I’m sorry.” He actually sounded it, even while holding a gun to her temple out in the snowy chill, with a dozen weapons trained on him._

_She kept her voice calm and even, although her heartbeat was pounding – there was, she found, a significant difference between being trained to deal with a hostage situation and being the hostage trying to deal with the situation.“You don’t have to do this.”_

“ _Yes, I do,” he said gently. “Because I am what they were. What we were made to be. And I can’t risk that.”_

_She felt his grip shift on the weapon, as though steeling himself for the shot._

“Lieutenant?”

Maria didn’t mean to step back, but for a moment the man standing there was darker, more hawkish. Then the memory faded, and it was just Rogers, watching her with concern.

“What is it?”

“Where did you want me?”

Operational matters helped dispel the memories. “Up front, with Xanders. He’ll take point – he’s been here before, you’re covering him.”

Rogers glanced back at the unit, all of whom were checking their weapons and gear before going in. The various techs had their devices ready for connection once they got in, and Jules was sorting through the body beacons – the pickup tags for the corpses they expected to find.

“You don’t expect to find anyone alive, do you?” Rogers kept his voice low.

“ _Transport 2180, what’s your tally?”_

_They couldn’t see her face, but they could hear her perfectly well over the comms. Maria made sure her voice was cold and steady when she spoke. “Four guards, nineteen corpses.”_

“ _Nineteen—? Jesus, Hill,” said the operator, breaking procedure. “What did you do to them?”_

_The chant rang in her ears:_ _**Angelus mortis** _ _**; a** _ _**ngelus misericors. Da nobis gratiam.** _

_The truth was that she’d done nothing more than turn up at the facility doors._

“Lieutenant?” Walters was consulting with Xanders, mapping out routes through the twelve levels of the facility. “We’re ready.”

Maria nodded as she brought her own weapon to port arms and settled the weight of it into her shoulder. She met Rogers’ gaze. _You don’t expect to find anyone alive, do you_?

“No,” she said, in answer to his question. “I don’t.”


	6. Chapter 6

In spite of what she’d said to Rogers, they got four levels down without finding anything but stale air and empty rooms.

Nobody alive, but nobody dead either.

Walters summed up the situation as the squad gathered in the middle of Sub-Level Four. “We’ve got lights but no power to the plug outlets. Nothing is destroyed or wrecked – except for a coffee cup in the kitchen on Sub-Level Two – and there’s no sign of a struggle.”

Everyone was uneasy, glancing around at every little sound, their expressions conveying their disturbance.

“Exley?” Maria called up the tech whom they’d left up on Sub-Level One in the observation room, trying to get the cameras back online. “Give me some good news.”

“I would if I could. Looks like they scrubbed the backups before they scrambled the system – and by scrubbed, I mean _scrubbed_. If we find anything on this, it’ll be garble. Nothing in the last day, but everything before then is coming back normal. Sanchez hasn’t spotted anything oddball either.”

“Keep me posted.”

Maria glanced around at the rest of the personnel, noting the unnerved expressions, the subtle shifts of weight that indicated unease. One of the squad had already quipped that it felt like they were in a horror movie, and although there’d been teasing about overactive imaginations and jokes about zombies, nobody had actually contradicted him – including Maria.

There was something not quite right here - like a whisper on the edge of her hearing, the hum of electrical equipment turned on at the plug but not active. It was as though there was the faintest buzzing in her head, not consciously inaudible but still felt.

_They were prison cells – there was no other word for them._

_Cold and cement, with a light that could be controlled from inside the cell as well as outside, a bed, a chair and table in some, and a rug. It was like seeing something out of a psychiatric ward of the seventies – cold and bleak and blank and empty._

_Except for the art on the walls._

“ _We issued them with pens,” said Dr. Lester. He sounded almost happy. “They have the souls of artists.”_

“ _And the bodies of soldiers,” Walters muttered._

_Maria didn’t say anything for a moment – her eyes were drawn to the blackly-inked calligraphy on the wall. It looked vastly out of place in the mad scrawl of everything else that the prisoner known as ‘the Weathervane’ had done._

“ _Religious?” She inquired, indicating the great scrolling thing that took up half the wall. Her voice was light, although her hands were cold._

“ _Not that his file says,” Lester remarked. “But they’ve had time to read all kinds of things, you know. And the Hail Mary has become something of an obsession with him. No surprise he should transmit it to the others.”_

Years later, standing five levels above the cells where men had been imprisoned and driven mad, Maria stifled a shudder.

“Hey?” Rogers hand touched her shoulder, his expression a question in and of itself.

She didn’t quite shake him off, but she stepped up to the group. “We’re going to split up,” she told them. “Three groups – Gunny, Anders, and myself. Gunny, you’re taking seven and keeping the sweep going – take it slow, be thorough. Anders, you’re taking four to the personnel annexe – I want to know if the living spaces were tossed, too. And I’ll take five down to Sub Nine. And yes,” she said as Anders opened his mouth with a faint grin. “I’m aware that if this was a horror movie, splitting us up would be fatal. However, we’re not _in_ a horror movie, and whoever took this facility off-line won’t have stayed around to wait for us to turn up and check things out.”

Walters didn’t challenge her on taking Sub Nine – the smallest, deepest, and least-accessible level of the facility – although the expression on his face said he wanted to. Maria was just as glad he didn’t. She had a report to make before they went deeper – so S.H.I.E.L.D. would know they’d come at least this far.

Exley relayed Maria’s report to Dom, then waited for the confirmation that it had uplinked to the satellites now passing over the facility. “All right,” Exley said after a moment. “It’s up, and Dom’s received the acknowledgement message. Good luck – and don’t be a hero.”

Maria snorted. “When am I ever?”

When she turned around, Anders’ team was already moving out, and Walters giving low-voiced instructions to Rogers which stopped as she arched a brow at him. Rogers’ gaze flicked over to her, then back to Walters, and he nodded and strode over.

“I’m with you.”

 _You’ve been asssigned to keep an eye me, you mean,_ she thought, a little annoyed at Walters’ paternalism.She knew he meant well, but she didn’t need his concern right now.

She addressed Fallon and Cooper, both of whom had been with the squad the first time they’d come here. In fact, it seemed that, but for Rogers, all four men had been with the squad the first time.

“Fallon, you’re point man. Cooper, run six. Rogers is second, I’m behind him. Sheehan and Mizuma fall in. I want to see the cells.”

“You think they were running more tests, ma’am?”

“No,” she said, and felt that sense of _something_ whisper through her for a moment. “But call it a hunch.”

As they moved out, their boots making soft noises across the cement stairs, Rogers murmured, “You don’t seem like the ‘hunch’ sort.”

“I’m not.”

“So what is this?”

She shrugged, unable to give him an answer that would satisfy him.

Unable to give him an answer that would satisfy herself.

The further down they went, the less it was a hunch. Maria could feel her instincts screaming at her, more than mere memory, the sensation that there were things moving past her, insubstantial, unidentifiable presences alongside – waiting...

Waiting for what?

It was a long descent to reach the level of the cells, flight after cement flight of stairs. The doors were locked and coded, requiring passkeys and security codes to enter. Maria consulted the list of override codes she pulled up via her security profile.

Slowly, in near-silence but for the patter of footsteps and the murmurs of the team, they made their way down through the facility.

_They moved fast – too fast for the eye to track – and three men were down before they even had a chance to defend themselves. Weapons came up but firing wildly in an enclosed space like this was beyond stupid, and the unit with her knew it even before she yelled, “Don’t shoot!”_

_And then Ash was there, his movements sure and deadly as he became a weapon with nothing more than his body – and that with his arms bound in front of him._

_Dr. Lester claimed their goal had been to replicate the Captain America project by Erskine._

_But this project wasn’t creating soldiers; it was creating killers._

Maria let Rogers and Fallon go in first. And she told herself that the thudding of her heart was the instinctive response to having nearly died the last time she’d been down here.

She was lying to herself.

The words, “Down, _now_ ,” formed on her lips before she was aware of them leaving her mouth.

She turned back the way they’d come, bringing her weapon up and automatically targeting the shadows that came around the corner – silent, human shadows, masked and armoured – with the leader already pointing a weapon at her.

 _Trank gun,_ she thought as she fired. _It’s a trap – to catch—?_

The sense of crowding was almost overwhelming now – never mind that she was in the middle of a S.H.I.E.L.D. unit, never mind that they were in close quarters. It was a mental sense of weight that was matched by something that felt almost physical, pushing down on her, narrowing down, arrowing in on—

— _Me._

Certainty punched her like fist in the gut as she pulled the trigger and the man with the trank went down. But there were others behind him, shielded by his body, and they were upon S.H.I.E.L.D in a moment.

A man leaped over the first, fallen man and came directly for her. Maria blocked his initial blow, and spun him off, stepping back to give herself space as the S.H.I.E.L.D. team moved in to engage. He turned with her, getting in close, using his longer reach and his bigger build to dominate the attack. She blocked, blocked, deflected, and dodged, feeling the pressure around her wax and wane, shifting like the light on a cloud-spotted day.

She had a sudden image of the pressure in her head like a web: surrounding her, spreading out from her, shifting with every movement of the attackers about her.

Something shifted in that sense, and instead of blocking the oncoming blow, she dodged it, turning aside so that his fist only skimmed her cheekbone – but slammed into the fist of the man who’d been about to slot a linen bag over her head.

Survival instincts did amazing things to her reflexes. Maria turned further and got an elbow into her first attacker’s gut, then used the momentum off that to slam her knuckles up into his chin, snapping his head up.

Voices in her ear, shouts and thumps, thuds, and grunts. Walters yelling at her in her earpiece, a howl of pain from a vaguely familiar voice. Yet the pressure in her mind demanded all her concentration and energy as they moved in on her.

She was aware there were bodies down – in S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms and in the nondescript body armour, but mostly in the S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms – but they were irrelevant.

_Darkness and stars and cold, craggy rock. Shadows that leaped and swallowed her whole..._

These men left behind in an empty facility had been sent to acquire _her_.

Maria knew it with a certainty that shook.

Like she knew that there was one behind her, like she could feel his run as he slammed into her from behind, pinning her arms to her side. He planned to press her face-up against the wall, planned to hold her as another one used the retrieved trank gun on her.

She got her boot up just in time to catch the wall with enough leverage to shove them back. He staggered back, and her weight on his upper half took them down to the floor. She heard the solid crack of his skull against the cement. His grip loosened and she jumped to her feet in a sinuous writhe – in time to meet the man with the trank gun coming at her.

_Disarm._

She’d learned her self-defence from a woman in the Israeli special forces – two inches shorter, hard-eyed, with a voice that could cut like a blade or purr like a cat – and under the demanding tutelage, learned it well.

Her outward block sent his aim wide, her sliding grip on the man’s hand would hurt as the pinched nerves screamed at him to let go of the gun, and her shoulder in his chestbone shoved him away far enough to shoot him in the throat with the trank.

Still too close; the dart embedded deep in his throat and he staggered back, wheezing.

Maria turned and shot each of the downed attackers, unerringly knowing where each one lay, barely having to look. Then she lifted her gaze to Rogers – the only other one left standing, and saw him waver a little, drifting sideways.

Or maybe that was her. Her brain felt too swollen for her skull, a pressure that was rapidly becoming pain.

“Are you okay? Hill? Maria?” He caught her shoulders, and was suddenly darker, stockier, wavier…

_Áve María, grátia pléna, Dóminus técum…_

“Ash?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this is as far as I've gotten with the story. The next scene was supposed to be Steve confronting Nick about what happened in the facility the first time around, but I've rewritten it about three times, and having seen _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ a couple of times in the last week, the overall thrust of the story I had for this seems...somehow inadequate.
> 
> I apologise for bringing you this far and not finishing it - I was hoping to get to the end of Part One at least (we're presently about 3/4 of the way through Part One) before things got really stuck. It's not my best work (or even one of my better ones, I fear), and I believe the response to it kind of reflects that.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, though! (And everything does work out in the end. I promise!)


End file.
